BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
In a letter on the next page Jeff Jones raises questions about referring today to all the republics that comprised Yugoslavia since the 1940s as the "Yugoslav workers state." He also asks that the Militant editors clarify their position on self-determination for Bosnia. These questions touch on some of the main issues at stake in NATO's war drive against Yugoslavia.
Since mid-December, the Militant stopped using the term "former Yugoslavia." We did so to underline the fact that neither the warring gangs that rule Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, nor the imperialist powers now intervening militarily have succeeded in overturning the workers state that Yugoslav workers and peasants established through a mighty anti-capitalist revolution in the mid-1940s. They haven't overthrown the working-class property forms, the new social relations working people put in place through that revolution.
This is what the armies of Washington, Bonn, London, and Paris hope to accomplish through a direct military assault on the working class of Yugoslavia. Saying "former Yugoslavia" gives to the thieves of Wall Street and the Elysée Palace something they haven't already taken - something they'll have a hell of a time wresting away from working people in that country.
Half a century ago Yugoslav workers and peasants led a successful revolution to win land, jobs, democratic rights, and better social conditions. In the process they cut across ethnic, language, and religious lines. They did so in a powerful struggle - led by an armed mass movement called the Partisans - against the local landlords and capitalists, as well as the imperialist powers of Europe and the United States. The revolution championed the rights of oppressed nationalities, codifying into law respect for their various languages, cultures, and religions .
The momentum of the revolution did not end in the 1940s. Despite the Stalinist-led government, the working class expanded its gains well into the 1950s and 60s. It pushed through affirmative action programs for less developed regions and republics, for example, narrowing the huge disparities in living and working conditions that ran along national as well as class lines under the former king. The anti-imperialist and class-struggle consciousness of working people was reflected in the mass student protests in 1968 demanding that the regime of Josip Tito drop its "neutral" stance and denounce the U.S. war against Vietnam. The process that led to Yugoslavia's formal break-up in 1991-92 is a later development that is not consolidated as an unambiguous course until well into the 1970s.
Tito's Stalinist regime was never able to return Yugoslavia to being a "prison house of nations." The Stalinists in power did not and could not act like the king, the fascist Nazi-backed Ustashi regime in Croatia, or Hitler's thugs, who recruited under the banner of exterminating Jews and other "non-Aryans."
The counterrevolutionary policies of the bureaucratic regime weakened the gains of the Yugoslav workers and peasants. But it's one thing to betray the revolution and another to overthrow it. As in the Soviet Union, the petty- bourgeois ruling stratum in Yugoslavia proved much weaker than the working class and the workers state. It never succeeded in creating the necessary conditions to restore capitalist social relations. While the bureaucratic caste itself shattered into competing gangs, the working class did not. As a result, the Yugoslav workers state has not been dismembered into little pieces, or multiple workers states, that imperialist troops are going in to scoop up.
Millions of workers and farmers of various nationalities still consider themselves Yugoslavs - not Serbs, Croats, or Muslims. They refuse to give up on the unity they gained and will resist any "shock therapy" measures aimed at restoring capitalism. It is this working class that is the obstacle to the invading imperialist powers. It is the same working class that has already provided countless examples of active opposition to the slaughter they were subjected to by the competing Stalinist bureaucrats and would-be capitalists in the various Yugoslav republics.
From the beginning of the war in 1991, the Militant has explained that this slaughter was orchestrated above all by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. But the government of Franjo Tudjman in Croatia has blood-soaked hands as well. These parasitic regimes - fragments of the formerly centralized Stalinist apparatus - used nationalist rhetoric to justify their drive to terrorize working people in order to grab control of land and other economic resources.
In the face of massacres of Muslims in Bosnia by gangs supported by Belgrade and Zagreb, hundreds of thousands of people in that republic - Muslim, Serb, and Croat - took up arms to oppose the division of Bosnia along national lines. The Militant has supported this fight by the people of Bosnia to defend their right to self-determination, to oppose the carving up of their unified republic.
This is different from calling for the secession of Bosnia. The Militant never advocated the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, or Bosnia. The declarations of independence came from the petty-bourgeois regimes in those republics in their efforts to grab resources for the castes they represented. Working people never began a movement for independence tied to the fight against national oppression in those republics.
The autonomous region of Kosovo in southern Serbia is the exception. There, in the late 1980s, miners and other workers fought the discrimination against the majority- Albanian population and demanded to maintain regional autonomy, a gain of the 1945 revolution.
On the question of self-determination, like on the question of the workers state, the Militant's starting point is the working class, not the proclamations and actions of the regimes in any of the Yugoslav republics.